The human-energy lit flashlight

Last Updated 13 years ago by Kenya Engineer

By Daisy Gakuu

Did you know that human energy can light up 100 Watt light bulbs?  Ann Makosinski, a 15-year old from Victoria British Columbia, designed a flashlight that provides bright light without batteries or moving parts. It only runs on the heat of the human hand.

The project, dubbed the ‘The Hollow Flashlight’ submitted in the Google Science Fair 2013, is made using four peltier tiles that produces electricity if one side is heated and the other is cooled.

 Makosinski mounted the peltiers on an area of 25mm diameter aluminum tubing, and placed inside a larger PVC pipe, insulated from it by air. The hand griped the tiles through an opening in the PVC pipe.

Air flowing through and around the aluminum tube cooled the flashlight. The circuit was mounted in the front, and the LED (Light-Emitting Diode) was centered in the middle of the Tiles were mounted on. The PVC pipe was wrapped with insulating foam.

“My design is ergonomic, thermodynamically efficient, and only needs a five degree temperature difference to work and produce up to 5.4 MW at 5 foot candles of brightness,” she said.

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